apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I've had to hike up stairs in my building when both of our elevators decided to die on a labor day weekend in Atlanta. (In case yall don't know, that's REALLY hot). The stairwells are merely for fire escape purposes and smell like sweat/cigarette smoke. Breathing nasty air for 10 flights up....not so much fun.

i spent a whole week taking COLD showers in Oaxaca when we missed the gas truck for the week! I adapted!

Well, I live in the part of Ohio that has been currently without power since Sunday afternoon because of the windstorm. Now my heart goes out to the people in Texas (I have family down there) who have it much worse than us but two morning of cold showers and no hot tea has been rough. But it has been nice lighting up the whole house with candles and reading with my husband. Plus we have been using our fire pit as well. It is a good experience to help to remember not to take things for granted. Hopefully when I get home from work everything will be up and running.

I didn't have hot water for 2 days in my apartment so I went home to my mom's house! My apartment also has no overhead lights (except for the kitchen) so when our kitchen tube light burned out (in our windowless kitchen) and the landlord was slow to fix it, we had to carry a table lamp back and forth from its original location to the kitchen to see anything for a couple days.

Then there is the delicate balancing act of trying to give your 4 and 1 year old a sponge bath while balancing the cold water from the sink with the hot water from the kettle while trying to keep them from touching the kettle

I grew up without a hot water pipe. So when we had to take a bath.. it was time to boil water. Good for us and the hair..the chemicals in the water would settle and there was pure water..no damage to the hair nor the skin

I went to visit a friend in Las Vegas who had her gas turned off while she was working out of state. I had decided to apply self-tanner before I went for some unknown reason so I smelled and needed to shower. Three showers with cold water. It had to be done, there was no gas available to boil water.

I have a panic attack if I forget my cell phone at home. It's like a piece of me now.

Last spring our building turned off our heat too early, leaving us without any heat for about a week while the temp dropped below freezing outside (yes, it was illegal, and that's why they finally turned it back on). Since our building is older and has little insulation, it was about 40 or 50 degrees inside overnight. I took lots of hot showers, stayed at work/school longer, and when i came home I crawled into bed with a cup of tea and a hot water bottle, in flannels and wool socks and with every tapestry/blanket/comforter I owned on top. It was oddly nice to have to snuggle in to bed for so long... I was very relaxed!

I've always lived in storm prone areas, so I've had probably months of no power/gas/etc. The worst-timed was a christmas eve – new years week ice storm; the longest was two weeks without power in the summer; and the most annoying was a week and a half without gas in the winter (no heat, no stove, no hot water).

My trick has always been to go shower at the gym.

Try living in Russia where they turn off your power and hot water without telling you. You learn to take a very fast (cold) shower.

Back in the States, I shower at the gym. It's true, you really take these things for granted until you don't have them.

I'm in Ohio as well. My half of town has power, while the other half will probably be out 10-14 days... I feel lucky.

I did all of last december without a functioning heater. So no heating, no hot water.
I adapted, learnt to accept cold showers when you're already freezing from the cold in the appartment. I think I took showers at friends' twice maybe. The most annoying was for the dishes actually. I don't own a dishwasher, and it was really annoying to try and clean the plates without hot water.
The plumber came 6 times before he found what was happening. It happened again in January, and April, each time for a week.
Now the landlord has eventually changed the damn thing.
But really, you just do with.

having lived in a pre-war building in Brooklyn for over 10 years, lack of hot water happens at least two or three times a month. Not to mention steam heat in the winter. We fight with the Super and the landlord to get it fixed with no avail. So we live with it.

Last night, my BF stayed over - I cooked dinner, made strawberry short cake, we went to sleep. The next morning after some serious cuddling and neither of us wanting to get out of bed, he went to take a shower.

...no water.

Not no -hot- water, but NO WATER. At all! Apparently, the guys doing construction half-a-block away hit something vital and the entire building lost the flow. I had to leave the toilet lid up for the kitties for fear they wouldn't have anything to drink all day!

In college, the heater broke, and I spent all winter in a chilly cinder-block dorm room with the vents blasting ice-cold air. The vents, of course, wouldn't stay closed and the air flow was so strong that it blew off anything we put up, including duct tape. When I moved out a year later it still hadn't been fixed.

Borrowing every spare blanket my family owned didn't help, so I bought a full-body vinyl catsuit from Hot Topic and slept in it all winter.

Still, it could have been worse. The men's dorm had no heat AND no hot water until sometime that spring.

After graduation, I spent a year in apartment management, and always responded promptly to whatever went wrong.

Two years ago when my roommate and I first moved to North Hollywood, we had no hot water because the building's water heater needed to be fixed. It took FOUR DAYS to get it fixed for some reason. Those were not a fun four days.
After that we'd periodically would have no hot water, and the on-site manager said that it was because it was windy.
We were strangely puzzled by what wind had to do with the hot water heater. He said that the wind kept blowing out the pilot light. We were also puzzled by that... until he informed us that the hot water heater was ON THE ROOF. That's an excellent place for it, don't you think?

Not having hot water start to become a daily occurrence, and almost everyone in the building complained (very angrily) every single day until the management actually did something and built a structure around the water heater so it wasn't just out in the open.

I really don't understand management companies sometimes. And I'm glad to not have to deal with any at my new apartment.

Yeah, one day without hot water is nothing. I was home to Ukraine for a month and there was no hot water in our part of the city for that entire month. And that was the very nice part of the city, with fancy new developments, lots of glass and steel etc. One just boils water on the stove and then dilutes it with cool water in a bucket and uses a large ladel sponge :) Or one visits friends in other parts of town.

no HOT water? that's nothing. i had to live without ANY water at all for two weeks last winter. a pipe busted under the sidewalk in front of the building. the water was turned off while the landlord and the city debated, at their leisure, who was responsible for fixing it. meanwhile the landlord/mgmt. company didn't even bother to bring us any jugs or bottled water to even flush the toilets. we had to buy it and lug it up multiple flights of stairs for ourselves every day. luckily my office has showers, so i'd go in early every couple days to take showers. it was an enormous inconvenience and once restored we were joyous to live like normal people again.

I remember the Christmas at my sister's when, just as the turkey was entering the oven, the winds knocked out the power. A noted difference between child- and adulthood: Complaining over the inconveniences, the chill in the house, and thinking living by flashlight was the coolest thing EVER.

One summer I lived on an Indian Reservation at a Boarding School in Arizona (up in the mountains where it's chilly, not down in Phoenix where you melt from the heat). Halfway through the summer, monsoon season hit (who knew?) and during one storm flooded the basement, killing the hot water heater. Since the building was jointly owned by three state/federal/etc agencies, it took the entire summer for it to be fixed. So really, we just took very cold showers for about 6 weeks. You do adapt, though I know I often just washed my hair in the sink and called it good.

My last apartment had some really ghetto landlords (for this area, at least). Once the flow on our shower [only] dropped to almost nothing, so we had no running water in the shower for a week before they fixed it. Not cool. They also liked to save money by not turning on the radiators until they absolutely had to, so we'd basically freeze until they decided it wasn't possibly going to warm up again. Lots of snuggling with kitties, and spending the night at friends' houses.